


A Practically Vigilant Pile-Up

by Pastafarian



Category: A Practical Guide to Evil - erraticerrata, StarCraft (Video Games), XCOM (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Crack Crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:46:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21749239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pastafarian/pseuds/Pastafarian
Summary: Matityahu Cohen has had a rough career. Part of XCOM until they were defeated, and then part of the Resistance; and now, falling through the air in an exosuit, pulled through a psionic rift into an unfamiliar world.
Kudos: 4





	1. Falling

He fell through the air, disoriented and fighting down vomit, a voice buzzing in his ear. 

“- is red. Ten - . - for five. You’re - . - sixty starb-back, terminal -.”

He breathed in for calm, breathed out. He was falling. He was in his suit and everything was going to be fine; he was _falling_ and he was going to die. _Orientate,_ _assess, evaluate, act_. He tasted the metal in his breath from the air tank and rebreather, wiggled the control sticks, felt the response. _Indicators all green, air good, planet down, don’t think about the drop._ He wasn’t dying this second; worry about the landing. _Jets full, look for water, you drilled on this back when_ \- and the radio barked, static gone.

“Conflicted landing! Matti, your LZ is red-red-purple, Romeo-Romeo-Papa, you’re terminal, acknowledge receipt.” She was pleading, a voice from his past that had his eyes go wide and a sharp inhale rip through his lungs.  _ Enemies present, situation is fucked, friendlies in your landing zone, and you’re at terminal velocity. _

"Acknowledged.” That much was reflex. “Captain, what the fuck? You’re dead."

"Matti, zone is red, I need you to go to auto and let me handle your drop or you'll pancake and waste my effort getting you here, acknowledge."

"Captain, you're a fever dream, a hallucination at best. Odds are, this is a psi trick, you got scanned or bagged, and your handler can fuck itself."

"Kiss my ass, Matti, I can prove it. The day I made Colonel you got drunk and told me your callsign was because your mom tried to abort you, how's that? We’re from different fucking timelines, there’s no time, you’re too far from the ocean and are gonna splatter what little you have in brains across the fucking ground!"

He flushed hot, then cold. He had never told her, had never ever told anyone. Had - "Shell, go to auto and take direction from Annette."

The jetboots and exorockets kicked in at the same time, roaring in his ears and crushing him against the frame, and he tasted nanomist as his vision went black.

.

_Matti. Matti. Mattisias. Mattitiahu._ The voice was insistent, but he pushed it away. _Matisyahu. Matti!_ _ON YOUR FEET, SOLDIER -_

“- AND REPORT FOR DUTY!” The words sunk in, and he shot bolt upright.

“MA’AM!” The word ripped itself out of his mouth. He paused. “Holy shit, Annette. Didn’t know you could sound like Sarge Olen.” Who had been dead for thirteen months before they hit the base, thirteen months before... she had had a scary-sharp memory, he knew, but deploying that voice of all of them was a surprise. Another surprise.

“Look around, Matti, and tell me what you see.”

“Force-dome, guessing that’s you. Weirdo contacts around us, don’t look friendly.” He shook his head, regretting doing it immediately. Man-sized furred bipedal rats, an array of mismatched stone robots, and leathery winged critters of some sort, nothing he had seen before. Twenty two of them. “I’d ask if we were in a simulation and this is a prank by some punk recruit, but we don’t have anything with this kind of feedback. Some sort of psi-trip? I'm bagged and tagged in a scanbox with you, living a false life while they mine my brain for tactics again?”

“It's complicated, but this is real. Last thing you saw and a sitrep.”

“Situation’s stable, I guess. Xenos deployed something new, some sort of humanoid psionic trooper with high mobility that threw around explosive rifts in reality, weird purple glow, white hair. Pretty good shots. Command said we were ‘stabbing our way up the food chain’ and should expect something like that.”

She blinked, then laughed. Gods, he’d missed that laugh. “Sounds like Command.”

“Teleported next to me when someone shot it, I took the finisher with the blade by reflex, figured worst it’d do was explode and kill me. Tell you what, though. Nothing they ever sent could do  _ that _ .” He nodded at the force-dome. “Contacts outside seem unfriendly but they’re not doing anything. What gives?”

“Always an eye on the ball, Matti. I had a whole speech prepared about why I pulled you through to here, you know.” He shrugged, and she smiled fondly. “You’ve changed, but you’re still the same. What gives is they can’t break through; they tried four times. Force, digging, teleportation, and something else.”

“And you’re doing that how?”

She paused, and he took a moment to take a deep breath, take a look around.  _ She always gathered her words when she didn’t anticipate a question or when something went differently _ . The memory came to him from decades back. The air was crisp, but musky; sunny skies, temperate, atmosphere that didn’t need any filtration. His suit was out of gas for the jets and down to one charge of mist, but he and it were in good shape; and hells, he’d missed his suit.

“Who are we, really?” She smiled at him, the canny smile, the smile that said she had a scheme running. “At the end of the day, what is the myth of who we are?”

“We’re the Resistance.” He grimaced. “Well, I was. You were dead.”

“Who we were, then.” She looked almost sheepish for a moment.

“ _ Vigilo Confido. _ ” She said it with him. “We watch. We hold the vigil, and we have faith that we will be needed.”

“This is a world where stories matter.” She stood tall, hands together as the dome shrunk slightly. “Where you can fall, tumbling, from a psionic rift, and survive. Where a woman might know that she will  **Withstand** whatever she has to. But I needed you, Matti.” Annette Durand smiled at him. Annette, whom he’d left in a self-destructing base decades ago, his own bullet through her head as she failed to fight off an Ethereal’s mind control. “So I brought you.”

“ _ Confido _ .” He breathed it. “What do you need from me?”

  
“Reach for it, Matti. Reach for the facets of who you are, the truths that define you, the truths that you wield against the universe and the boot that grinds down on your throat.” Her voice was a husky growl. “Twenty two foes stand before you, outside a shield dome that will soon fall. Who are you, what are you, when the darkness comes?”

“My name,” he said softly, “is Matityahu Cohen, and once I bore a shotgun and was borne by my suit in turn with a railgun in my hand. By the grace of the Resistance, I became a Ranger.” He stepped out of the exosuit.  _ The right tool for the right job _ . “I was held, mined for tactical information, an unwilling quisling and slave. Released, I was a sword in the hands of the night.”

He drew the sword, and the dome flickered. “What are you,” she said again, softly, “in this place called Creation, when the darkness comes?”

“ _ Vigilo Confido. _ I am of XCOM. We know that the darkness will come; we  **Prepare** .”

Silence and darkness spread, and the Reaper and the Volunteer walked across a field, twenty two headless corpses in their wake.


	2. Travel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Annette performs exposition.

“So let me get this straight.” Matityahu rode his exosuit with a gracelessness that showed how long it had been since using one in earnest. “They call this place Creation, and the Gods are real, and feuding.”

“I don’t know if feuding is the right word.”

“Arguing, then.” He looked at his companion, Annette, and felt a wash of nostalgia. They’d argued like this in the old days, had they not? “So they’re arguing, and they decide, okay, let’s empower some mortals. And from that, they hand off … powers.”

“Not exactly.” Her hand wiggled back and forth in a  _ sort-of-yes, sort-of-no  _ gesture. “Gods Above, they hand off powers. Gods Below, they empower what you already were. Approximately.”

“Approximately. How did you wind up here, anyway?” He looked around, breathed deeply again of the air in these pristine mountains, marveling at how good he felt just to taste it. Trees that felt like they were touching the sky surrounded them, dappled shade on the loam and leaves carpeting the space between them. “This is amazing. In every sense of the word.”

“Fell through a rip in the universe.” Annette grimaced, then looked away. “We won, in my timeline. Shot our way up the food chain, we both wound up Colonel-by-courtesy, you put a blaster bomb between the eyes of the Ethereal Commander in that monstrous flying Cathedral of theirs and Saint-Jean filled the hole with plasma.”

“Saint-Jean died a Squaddie.” His voice was quiet. “Thin Man got him trying to evac after a busted op, we were so green back then. Just the old Sectoids, Thin Men, and one goddamn murdertank of a Muton with a plasma rifle.”

“Your timelines sucked, Tansy.” Her voice was somber, but there was a glimmer of a laugh in it. “In mine, I punted you halfway to the shuttle before taking their ship up out of orbit when the drive destabilized. Beats the alternatives. Didn’t figure this would happen.”

They walked for a while, he focusing on relaxing into old reflexes while the legs of the suit did their own thing, she giving him space to digest. “Timelines, plural?”

“There’s clusters of them. Millions of clusters, literally millions. Most timelines just fade out, some of ‘em come to a real bad end, maybe one in twenty we win in. Eventually.”

“So why mine?”

“You were most like the Tansy I married.” She waved her hand in the air lazily as he gaped, sun glinting off the wedding ring he hadn’t noticed, and then raised in a stop motion. “True to form. We’ve got company.”

.

Company turned out, to one baffled Reaper’s displeasure, to be more of the bipedal rat-things. About shoulder-high on him, they skittered and screeched, rushing them in a disorganized but viciously aggressive mass. This was the third pack of them they’d encountered, each at some sort of dramatic moment in his conversation with Annette, and his sword carved a casual swathe through them as he tried to marshal his thoughts.

She, for her part, was aping a casual unconcern that belied the careful way her eyes followed his movements. He’d practiced for over a decade with his weapon, a bastardized piece of metal halfway between a broadsword and a cleaver and tipped with a cutting current of plasma, and he’d come by the Reaper title the now-classic way: three seconds, ten strikes, ten aliens killed. These thirty-odd were split by her force-walls into groups of around that size, and they died more easily than his old foes ever had, but he felt acutely self-conscious as her eyes bored into him.

He’d been interested, sure, but that had been twenty years ago. Twenty years that hadn’t touched her face, or her hair, or the panther-like way she moved. She’d explained that something about the nature of the power they had been bestowed with, their Confirmations as she’d put it, meant the two of them wouldn’t age past their self-image, physically; he supposed that would be an interesting voyage of self-knowledge, whether he stayed the same or gotten younger as she must have.  _ Won’t mind the spryer knees _ , he thought, and sheathed the sword.

“We have an audience.” Annette had stopped ogling him and was having a staring contest with the air between two trees. “Bad news, Matti; feels like undead.”

“Of course there’s undead.” His hand drifted over to his sword again and he tried to focus on whatever she was looking at. “Fast zombies? Slow zombies?”

She muttered something under her breath, then snapped a finger. Sparks flew between them, and the air off in the distance wavered as though it were a heat-mirage. “Skeletons again, I think. with a connection to something greater. Was a lich, last time.”

“How many times - never mind. If there’s a lich, can we talk to it? It’s not attacking yet.”

She shrugged. “They don’t respond to English, and they attacked the second I used French. I couldn’t hurt it, so I ran like hell.”

“I guess it’s time for me to use my classical education, then.” He smirked, then blinked. Into the expectant silence, he coughed, then sighed, shoulders slumping.

  
“Don’t remember any of it?”

“It’s been thirty years!”

“You had a Masters in Classics! You used to quote Sappho in the original!” He looked over at her; yep, blushing just a little bit. That gave an awkward and obvious answer to context. “It was romantic, alright?”

  
“Okay, first, that’s the nerdiest thing I’ve ever … a version of me has ever done, which is saying something. Second, is the air over there vibrating towards us?”

“ _ Putain _ .”  _ Okay, not great if she’s resorted to cursing. _ She thrust out a hand, grabbing and twisting at the air, sweating visibly with effort. It was like a veil being ripped away; his eyes locked onto the skeleton in the center, flanked on each side by two zombie-like figures as it marched towards them, radiating menace.

“Third, here’s all I’ve got.” He took a breath, bracing himself for battle as the rippling tension between the group and Annette intensified. “אתה מדבר עברית?”

And with the scent of death and a bright, sudden flash of burning green in its eyes, the skeleton stopped in its tracks and turned to look square at him.


	3. Setup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A civil conversation with a terrifying figure.

Matti was having a very strange day. He had first fallen out of the sky in a mech suit he had not worn in decades, onto a new planet, with a woman from his past whom he had had to kill out of mercy. Now he was standing in a sepulchral forest talking in biblical Hebrew with a skeletal lich of some sort, over the corpses of a few dozen rat-like man-things.

Could be worse, he supposed. The air smelled nice, and nobody was trying to kill him this very minute.

“The sun rises and the sun falls upon the children of the children who last heard this language, and their children, unto a hundred generations.” A dramatic pause. “Who are you, who speaks the words of ancient ritual as brother to brother?”

Matti frowned, parsing. His accent, in those slow and rolling incantation-like sentences, was unlike anything he was remotely used to, but he was not surprised; the lich had named the language as Ancient Liturgical Ashkaran, which he supposed was about right, substituting the last bit, for most of Earth’s history. It mapped pretty well, though, gendered nouns and plural-you included, which was a familiarly bizarre thing to parse. It was still a pain in the ass to pick and choose his words, avoiding the neologisms of the modern tongue. “Travelers,” he finally said into the patient silence. “Come we have from afar, and to afar shall we go; and we will have gone sooner, in peace.” Or in other words, get out of our way and we’ll get out of your hair, he thought to himself.

“Within the books of my home dwell all things known to the lands of Calernia. My people search also in the near and also in the far, for a word which speaks of you; even in prophecy and writings of the Gods they will search, a gift for a stranger.” He paused, long enough for Matti to work out the syntax.

My people could be my minions or it could be my brethren, but either way this is a straightforward offer of help, will-have-been-searching. I think. So. “And it was written in the book of all lives, that it was so; and was not a stranger a guest in your tent?” I hear your words, but.

The skeleton’s facial structure shifted into a faint and terrible smile. “Welcome be within; drink of my water and eat of my bread, and you are a guest unto me, and I a host unto you.”

“Of your bread a morsel shall we take to sustain our souls, and of your water a drop to sustain our bodies; and we shall be like unto a guest to you, as you a host to us.” Matti’s shoulders sagged just the slightest bit in relief. “I am called Matityahu, son of Yaakov of the Priest’s line; she who walks with me is Annette, daughter of Claude.” Annette startled to hear her name, flicking her eyes at him. I’ll explain later, everything is cool, he tried to convey non-verbally.

The skeleton began walking towards one of the trees, ghouls having disappeared somewhere. There was a cloth laid out on the ground there, with bread and a twisted piece of brown paper than Matti strongly suspected contained salt; the oldest form of the ritual, as far as he was aware. He spoke in those old, incantation-like cadences as he walked, no less clear for facing away from them. “In times as these... when my name is spoken, cry they Neshamah, King of the Dead.”

.

There will have been an awakening of language, if I were permitted to study you; a guest you are of mine, and you will be well. Those had been the words of this Neshamah, once they had shared bread and salt and water. The pain, to be fair, had faded from him quickly enough, and it was far more convenient to converse in English.

“Ratlings.” Annette had gotten over her wide-eyed astonishment and was talking with one of the ghouls, who was perfectly happy to gab with her in French about something related to magic. In the meantime, he was trying to get the lay of the land. “It’s good to know their name, but our interest doesn’t particularly lie with them.”

“You may find that it does.” The skeleton’s face was amazingly mobile, conveying complex emotions with deceptive ease despite being monochromatically white bone. “Your unfamiliarity with Creation and its rules makes far more sense, to know that you are from a different… plane of existence, perhaps?”

“Works as an operating hypothesis.” Annette had been chilled to find out that some godling meta-lich had casually sacrificed a fair bit of an army to bait her into a win and then a draw, all to set up a win for himself that he’d thrown away when Matti had spoken to him in Hebrew. Neshamah had waved it aside with a some things are more important than other things, but he had taken note of how bad an idea it would be to piss this person-or-godling off, and the extent to which he had saved her life. “But why should we care about these ratling things? They’re speed bumps, and we need to figure out a way home.”

“You have fought only their children.” The voice was dismissive. “Their youngest and weakest are, yes, no match for you in such small number, but in a true swarm they cover the land from horizon to horizon. The adults among them might rival one of you in strength, and there are some hundreds of them in such a gathering; and the elders, the Horned Lords, are… difficult to describe and have one not possessing first-hand knowledge accept it.”

“Horizon to horizon.” Matti let a trace of my skepticism leak into his voice. “The logistics of that seem difficult, given your technology level. Possible, sure, I don’t know their biology, but what objective would they be going for, in these forests?”

“It matters not.” Even more dismissive. “A stranger travels to find his way home; he finds new companions, foes, and a source of wisdom on the way.”

“Huh. A story.” His voice was slow and thoughtful. “So whatever they’re looking for, they’ll be in my way, because you’re choosing not to be.”

“And had I chosen otherwise, providence would have supplied an opportunity for you to wound me.” At Matti’s surprised look, he chuckled incongruously, slow and low. “I do not say that you would have succeeded, and you certainly would have died. Her, without a whimper; but without a doubt you have Aspects as yet unformed.”

He stopped, and Matti frowned, working it through. “They would have formed in response to the situation. My back to the wall, attacked without cause, defending myself on my road home.”

“You are not a tool of my enemy’s, but it is a Story she might have crafted.” There was a moment of contemplative silence. “I will offer you what assistance I can. You are a danger to me, a doom unto me for reasons I will not share, for hope you need not know; I require only that you depart Calernia as quickly as are able, and linger not a moment for any reason.”

“That’s… a hard ask, potentially.” Matti rolled the idea around in his head, while the Dead King waited silently to hear an answer. I left Annette to die once before, and she’d sacrificed herself to save me, or a version of me; but it’s not like we have a choice. “I’m guessing the concern is that if I linger even a moment, the moment will be gone, and whatever doom you’re trying to avert by helping me will happen?”

“The traveler is given a chance to go back home, a chance to have what he claims to desire. He hesitates.”

“The chance is lost. It’s a Story.” He sighed. “It’s not like we have much choice, right? When the terrifying meta-lich is the friendliest native around, you work with what you have.”

The undead god-king in question smiled, a chill going through the air and momentarily easing. “This one was Named, in his time and tongue, the Lorekeeper of the Wilds. She knows the area and has fought the great Horned Lord you will face.”

Matti turned around slowly to see a ridiculously huge woman, maybe six foot six and proportionately broad, looming over him. His eye picked out subtle wrongnesses, bits of not-quite-right flesh, but she was astonishingly healthy-looking. “Hi?”

“We will travel, we three.” She started walking off, away from the party, and Matti startled and looked back towards Neshamah. Towards where Neshamah was, had been; now there was only Annette, heading towards him, and no trace of the others or of the tent. “Come! And I will speak to you of the Skein.”


	4. Hunter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The party meets a fourth, and Annette comes into another Aspect.

_ There are three things you need to watch out for _ , the Lorekeeper of the Wilds had told her traveling companions,  _ when you are bearding a monster in its lair, even if that monster is more villain than beast. The travail, the pivot, and the sacrifice. _

The travail was pretty obvious, and in hindsight, Matityahu felt like he should have expected it. The Dead King had told them what had seemed like tall tales about these ratling creatures he’d been cutting through like chaff; that these were the children and weaklings of the race, that the adults were a match for him and the elders crushed buildings underfoot. That they would fill the valleys and vales when they went on the warpath, that they would be a flood across the plains from horizon to horizon.

This was not quite that, not by a fair margin, but the near-desert laid out before them must have had a few thousand of the not-so-little adolescent ratlings backed by a dozen of what must be adults, ten or so feet tall and bristling with spines and natural weaponry. They milled about, slashing at each other but staying clustered in the shade of a great pillar.

Or what Matti took to be a great pillar, until it moved.

“So that’s what we need to kill, huh.” Matti’s voice was dreamlike, vacant. He sat down on the hill, armored exosuit idle beside him, looking at his two companions. “I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think my biggest shots are going to do more than scratch the big one.”

“Sixty feet tall and bipedal. How does that even work?” Annette sounded genuinely curious.

“Please tell this person with the spear not to kill me,” the Lorekeeper added.

It took a moment for the words to sink in, after which both Matti and Annette spun around. True to her words, she was on one knee, hands pressed tight against the shaft of a spear whose head was slowly creeping ever closer to her head. Sword coming out, he moved at the speed of thought to slash up through the shaft, which drifted almost casually out of the way of his strike. 

“ _ Neònach _ .” The newcomer took a slow step back, spear held at the ready. “ _ Tha mi dona aig an ro-blàr. Dòchas gu leòr dhuinn uile. _ ”

“And hello to you too.” Matti grinned at the stranger, a mix of endorphins and adrenaline flooding his body.  _ Okay, that escalated quickly, but hello!  _ The woman was stunning, tall angular cheekbones and rippling lean muscle blending together into five and a half feet of panther-like menace, dressed in tight leather that showed off just how fit she was. Around each of her wrists orbited a ring of multicolored beads, about a half inch off the cuffs of her gloves, and her spear moved in slow, gentle motions to point at first him, then Annette, then back to the Lorekeeper.

“Holy shit, you speak Gaelic.” Annette’s voice was delighted. “Um.  _ Cara? Ceangail _ ?”

The woman’s face fell. Grounding the hilt of her spear into the ground, she let out an agonized sigh and sat, face in her hands, shaking her head.

“Well. I think this one’s all yours.” Matti smirked, then stepped to the side. “Have fun!”

.

Her name was Hunter, it turned out, or maybe that was her capital-N Name, and she was a loner and a wanderer. A borderline suicidal loner and wanderer, outcast from her clan for some reason and looking for… “Quests?”

Annette nodded. “More or less. She went tracking the portents of something awful rising in this region and found, well, this.” She waved a hand at the four-storey-tall furred monster on the plains below us.

“So if she’s looking for a fight that’ll kill her, why is she still here and not tangling with that thing and its minions?”   
  


“Suicide is forbidden her.” The Lorekeeper’s voice startled Matti every time he heard it, resonant and rich and rippling with layers of intonation. “It would cheapen her punishment; she must live, and grow, and know always that forgiveness will never be within her grasp. Even so she must strive for it.” She spoke to Hunter in that strange rippling Gaelic that Annette could speak just that little bit of, then nodded at the reply. “She hoped to greet the Skein alone, which she might have overcome, and sees it now with an army.”

“And she attacked us because?”

The Lorekeeper shrugged at him. “She sees my nature, and thought that you did not. Even still she considers whether Providence has brought her to this place to kill us, or to fight beside us.”

_ My nature.  _ Matti grimaced. The Lorekeeper of the Wilds was an undead Revenant of a Hero, raised by some sort of necromantic meta-lich Dark Lord they called the King of the Dead, and it was either the saving grace of the situation or the worst part that he was their only ally in this place. “I notice you didn’t say try to kill us, and you didn’t say kill the Skein with us.”

“You are as children to her.” The Lorekeeper smiled. “She struck at me, whom she thought was beguiling two questors; fighting us otherwise gets her no closer to her desire.”

“Which is death.” A nod. “So, is this the pivot? It seems too obvious a choice to be a pivot. We pick up an ally, she gets us to clear her way so she can have a plausible enough shot at the Skein to make dying not suicide.”  _ Not that I intend to die _ , he thought to himself.  _ Too much intel from Annette that I need to get back to Central and the Commander. Lucky me, getting the scoop from someone who’s seen a different timeline play out. _ “Anyway, you said it was the travail, then the pivot. And the journey here wasn’t the easiest, you know, but I’m not sure it was really a full travail’s worth of hassle?”

“Our travels are curtailed, so surely the travail must be.” Annette’s voice was quiet, distant. “This is the pivot. I am sure of it.”

“Whether she joins us or kills us? Seems -”

“ _ Non _ .” She cut him off, uncharacteristically. “The pivot is this.” She breathed deeply, walking to the edge of the cliff they were standing on. Matti shivered, feeling an electric tingling in the air, something not quite physical.

“There are two ways this could go,  _ oui _ ? I have two little tricks up my sleeve. Perhaps the easier one is cleaner, but… I was an operative of XCOM. I had the Gift, I had… I was, I still am, the Volunteer. So I will handle this problem, and you will be ready to move.” She put her hands together in a gesture of almost prayer. “From what I have heard from you, this power, the aliens developed it as well. But in my timeline? Only one person ever wielded it.

“They told me this is worship. That what I am is worship, of Below, of the ones who empower us.” She raised her head to the sky, smiling thinly. “I am French. We killed our gods,  _ l’empereur il est mort et l’roi _ , we killed them again when they were alien Elders, Ethereals. I spit on you.”

“Annette, what are you -” Matti’s voice was a desperate plea.

“I spit on the Gods!” Her voice roared up to the skies. “I give you no worship other than this: I will do whatever it takes to get us back home, just as I would do whatever it took to keep Earth safe!

“I am the Volunteer! I am the greatest Psionic Operative ever to ride an Avenger! So! There is an army standing in my way, on these desert plains?” Her voice rose and rose. “ **RIVE** !”

Her voice shrieked out across an army of ratlings, and the world tore apart around them.


	5. Pattern

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fighting the Skein is kind of bullshit.

Matityahu Cohen had seen a lot of shit in his life. He’d been first-out-the-door of an Avenger more times than he cared to remember, clearing the field first in nigh-useless antiballistic cloth and then in a MEC suit; he’d kept fighting long after the war ended, a terrorist or a freedom fighter or both keeping a banner alive. He’d put a sword through a civilian acting just the wrong kind of strange just in time to see an alien flesh abomination rupture out of its skin, not once but twice, with two different kinds of aliens, no less.

Annette’s psionic riftstorm wasn’t the worst thing he’d seen, but the way the world shattered around them might have been. He was in the air before he consciously realized what he was doing, hitting his jump jets in long-honed reflex.  _ Concealment broken,  _ he thought to himself with a wry grin. Dozens upon dozens of operations had trained him to a razor’s edge, to launch himself into action as fast as the communications networks of his enemy could alert the survivors of whatever form the first strike took. I didn’t have the Commander riding shotgun in my comms to advise me, but the priorities were always the same: assess, eliminate, maneuver, repeat.

_ Assess _ . The word spoken and the pulse of earth-shattering power from Annette hadn’t fully riven the world apart. It had, however, shattered some sort of overlayer upon the world that had seemed so placid. Beneath it, the great pillar that was the Skein was laughing as the psionic storm ravaged its army and the medium-sized creatures, the  _ adult ratlings _ , lunged forwards. They were much closer than they had seemed.  _ Stealth, of a sort. _ The jump-jets on his suit gave him enough hang time to take a second look.  _ Isn’t going to go well for them _ . The storm’s rage clove the earth and sealed it again to crush the creatures into mush, hurled boulders that shattered them like badly-fired clay, and occasionally just manifested as great clouds of psionic lightning that blew them apart directly.

_ Eliminate _ . The adult-sized ratlings weren’t particularly fazed by the storm, though they were moving mostly defensively. They could tell when and where the ground was going to erupt, they were strong enough to punch through a flying boulder, and the psionic lighting might have been causing them to slam into the ground screaming a discordant, two-toned siren of pain and rage, but it wasn’t killing them. There were four of the big boys charging at the four humans; in an almost contrived coincidence, the HUD read four shots available, right next to  _ Ammo Conservation Enabled  _ and  _ Expanded Storage Will Be Depleted _ .

The humming thrum of the suit was different. Deeper, almost chordal in its complexity. Matti had made grade on the Triple-M, the MEC Model Machinegun, just in time for it to get swapped out for the newest, shiniest damn weapon he’d ever seen, a railgun powered off of the same technology that they’d used to build the double-lensed heavy coil lasers they’d started to mount on the Interceptors right around the turning point of the War. He’d been breach-point for five missions with Mister Friendly before everything had finished going to shit, and he knew its sound; this wasn’t it. So when a blue laser painted his first target, he didn’t know what to expect.

The blast took the suit off-course enough that he had to manually correct with the jumps, cursing as he recalculated the hang time in the split second between dealing with the much lower recoil and when the next shot was queued for. He was already correcting the suit’s aim for the second shot, not looking to see what the results of the first was, and then the third. There was a warning blinking yellow on the HUD, but Matti ignored it, lining up the fourth even as he plummeted to the ground, and the shot went off and took an eight-foot-tall screeching rat-monster down the line of its body in mid-leap.

He used the momentum of the shot, anemic though it was, to set himself off running backwards and curved to come around. It’d been about two and a half seconds, and the yellow icon had turned red. Flames; Matti squinted and it picked up his attempt to focus on it, displaying  _ Heat Capacity Exceeded; Particle Cannon Offline _ . He hummed in thought.  _ Particle cannon, huh? An ionized pathway in the air, and some sort of super-high-energy particles at ludicrously high speeds. _ Maybe some sort of coolant discharge, too, if it had such a strong recoil.

_ Maneuver _ . He ran, mechanically enhanced muscles taking four or five meters at a bound. The world exploded around him, flickers of alternate realities lashing out like threads from a loom, and he did my best to dance around them. It wasn’t good enough; a conjunction of a lava lake and the deepness of space ripped apart one of the leg actuators of the suit and he bailed out of it, pulling his shotgun and sword out and slotting them smoothly into their holsters on his back even as he dove and wove.

He wasn’t as fast this way, but he was more maneuverable than he’d ever been on Earth, and it was almost easy to avoid the next strike. The one after that he felt coming and just sidestepped, skidding to a halt, and there wasn’t another.

_ Repeat. Assess _ . Four big ratling corpses steamed on the ground that had ten seconds earlier been doing their damndest to charge into melee. Three of them might plausibly be only mostly dead, but the one that’d been shot last had had the particle cannon charge go the long way through its entire torso, and there just wasn’t enough left of it to hold together. Annette was floating in the air, her maniacal, cackling laughter and string of French curses echoing across the field of battle; her psionic storms had more or less run their course, though, and she was starting to descend, wrapped in a bubble of power that sizzled and crackled every time one of the Skein’s flickering weave of nightmare worlds touched it.

The other two humans were on the move, surging with inhuman speed towards the foe. Hunter was a breathtaking vision of athleticism and grace with the ability to even change direction in mid-air, moving by leaps and bounds. Lorekeeper, on the other hand, was economical in motion, as though moving in a choreographed, pre-arranged dance with the Skein. It screamed a challenge at them in a language Matti couldn’t identify, much less speak, and Hunter screamed back something ululating and liquid, and the battle was on.

There were three things Matti could tell about the fight from the moment it began.

First, they were entirely out of his league. Lorekeeper’s punches split the air like thunderclaps, quite literally striking faster than the speed of sound, and his eyes couldn’t follow Hunter’s movements; and even still they scored only glancing blows on the Skein that seemed to not even inconvenience it as it spun to follow the Lorekeeper and charged at it.

Second, the Skein was jobbing. Its camouflage had been shattered by Annette, but it should still have had two other tricks up its sleeves. Hunter and Lorekeeper weren’t proving enough to pull one out, not without pulling out their own tricks, and they’d been clear that the first to commit more than mundane might was almost always going to lose unless it was a knockout blow or forced a greater commitment from the opponent.  _ Weave _ , Matti thought to himself, putting a name to the … Aspect. That was what it was down, and it wasn’t entirely down; the threads were still in play, more dangerous than its claws or viciously swinging tail.

The third thing he could tell about the fight was his moment. He knelt there on the ground, breathing slowly, and felt the power gathering around him.  **Prepare** , he thought to himself.  _ It doesn’t matter if it’s a mistake to commit. This is how we operate, in the Resistance. We bide our time, we set up, and then we take our chance. We strike.  _ There were three bundles of power that he could feel with my mind, three pools of what amounted to the frank bullshit of this world. That had been one of them, and the second was singing to him, coalescing into a shape that hearkened back to a skill he’d honed in the urban battlefields of the war-after-the-War.

**Shadowstep** , Matti thought, and breathed, and with a lunge he was standing behind the Skein. Leaning forwards, it held Hunter’s spear between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and Lorekeeper’s arms - not even her fists, all the way up to her shoulders - in the other, and the splintering of wood and the snapping of bones were sickeningly audible.

Matti thumbed the shotgun to Rapid Fire and pulled the trigger. The shards of alien alloy blew through its great, towering hulk of a body, the pinnacle of the work of the most brilliant scientists and engineers Earth had ever produced piggy-backing off of the sustained brilliance of an alien empire.

There was a pause, a screaming, vicious pause. Then the creature spoke. It was one word, one great rumbling word, and Matti knew its meaning in his bones /

**Spool** .

/ and he skidded to a halt, sidestepping the lava lash of the Skein’s woven realities, as the Lorekeeper and the Hunter charged the great monster that was staring right at him, consideringly.


End file.
